It’s a flat-out no-brainer that building links is vital for SEO. A common problem is finding relevant links from high quality sites. In other words, the whole link building process can be time consuming and expensive in its own way. Of course you don’t want to have wasted any time or money, so it’s important to build links with caution to prevent any mistakes. The right kind of knowledge and actions can prevent many link building mistakes. This article will discuss a few common backlink building mistakes that can cause you heartache and lost time.
One common mistake many people make is trying to get backlinks from sites that have no relevance to their own site’s topic or niche at all. In order to build effective backlinks, you need to find sites that contain similar topics or keywords to yours. For example, if your site is all about weight loss, there’s no point in getting backlinks from gardening sites. There is no value in a non-relevant backlink. While it’s not always easy to locate the better quality sites within your own niche, it’s definitely not impossible. Unless you’re targeting a very tiny niche market, chances are that you already have a high number of sites that are relevant and which could be used in your link building campaign. Type in your own niche’s keywords into a search engine and you’ll be surprised how many other sites are out there with similar topics to your own. Simply email the webmasters of these sites and ask them if they’ll give you a backlink. Many people don’t like the idea of asking webmasters for links, but it really is one of the better ways to get the links you need. It will take some time before you can get in touch with a large number of webmasters, but eventually the efforts will be worth it. Be patient about contacting only the relevant site owners and you’ll see far better results than aiming at irrelevant websites.
Another comon mistake is approaching a webmaster to add a link for you on a page where there are already plenty of other links. Backlinks have far more value when they’re coming from pages that don’t already have hundreds of other backlinks on them. Many of these pages happen to have 200+ backlinks and having your link among all these links wouldn’t make much of a difference. You might also find sites and directories like this have “nofollow” tags on any non-paid links they add. This means even if there were 200+ links on that one page, with most of them being “nofollow, excluding yours, then it will count.
You’ll make your links more powerful by taking advantage of the suggestions you just read about. These mistakes are easily avoided if you keep them in mind.